“So I took the record to California and of course they thought it was great until I told them he was black, and then they still thought it was great. They said, ‘This’ll be very different.’ The only determination we had to make was whether to put his picture on the sleeve of the record to let the people down South know that he was black, because we thought maybe they might boycott our records or something. And we were wrong. We were completely wrong. We never had one complaint.
“I asked Charley, ‘Why do you just sing country? Do you sing anything else?’ He said, ‘No. My dad would tune in that Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night, and I liked it. I learned to sing like some of those guys, and that’s the way it happened.’ He pulled it off better than anyone ever could have. He’s just such a great gentleman, and he’s sharp, and he’s a hell of a singer. And I’m so proud of that accomplishment. I think I’ll be remembered for that if not anything else.”
In early 1966, the Mel Tillis tune “The Snakes Crawl at Night” became Charley’s first country single. Toward the end of the year, he made the charts with “Just Between You and Me,” written by Jack Clement. Rozene was still working as a medical technician in Montana. Charley nervously resigned from the smelter to see if he could make any money singing his first songs.
“Royalty checks were a long way off and a long time coming,” Charley recalled in his autobiography. “Rozene and I still lived as frugally as we had before, determined to pick our way slowly across this new terrain, taking nothing for granted, spending nothing until it was in the bank.”
To everyone’s surprise and relief, country audiences embraced Charley warmly when he hit the road. His sincerity, solid country singing, and quips about having a “permanent tan” charmed fans everywhere.
“MY FIRST TIME THAT I appeared on the Grand Ole Opry was in 1967, January 1. I was elated, happy, scared, and nervous. I mean, all those in one. I appeared on the Opry many times after that, and every time it brought back those nervous butterflies I had back in 1967, when Ernest Tubb brought me on for that first appearance.”
He was invited to join the Opry cast but had to decline because he was suddenly too busy to become a regular. In 1969, he landed his first number-one record, “All I Have to Offer You Is Me.” In 1971 came his signature song “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’.” By the mid-1970s, Charley Pride was outselling every star on RCA’s roster with the exception of Elvis Presley. Charley used his clout to help launch the careers of other million sellers, such as Janie Fricke, Neal McCoy, and Ronnie Milsap.
“In terms of helping country music to expand, I truly believe that I was part of that,” says the thirty-million-selling Country Music Hall of Fame member.
His open-ended invitation to perform on the Opry remained in place until he was formally inducted into the Grand Ole Opry cast on May 1, 1993.
“I’ve done shows all over the world, but there is a special magic about stepping onto the Opry stage,” says Charley Pride. “But I never thought I’d actually make it onto the stage at the Ryman Auditorium or become a member of the Opry, which is truly the icing on the cake.”
24
A Woman’s Love
In 2007, Alan Jackson sang movingly of “A Woman’s Love.” His wife, Denise, gave him much more than her love—she gave him his career.
“I was thinking about coming to Nashville in 1985,” Alan recalls. “I didn’t know anybody. I’d never been to Nashville—I’d hardly been out of Georgia my whole life. I didn’t even know what producers did or what publishers were. I didn’t have a clue. My wife had just started flying with airlines [as a flight attendant], and she saw Glen Campbell and his band waiting for a flight in Atlanta. We’d never been around stars or anything. But she just walked up to him and introduced herself. She told him we were thinking about moving to Nashville and asked him if he had any advice.
“I wasn’t the kind of person who felt comfortable approaching celebrities,” wrote Denise in her best-selling book It’s All About Him, “but I knew this opportunity wasn’t going to come by again any time soon.
“He looked just as I remembered him from the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour on TV when I was a child. . . . I knew what I had to do.”
“She wasn’t submitting a tape to him or anything,” Alan recalls. “I didn’t even have a tape. And Glen was real nice. He gave her the business card of Marty Gamblin, who ran his publishing company in Nashville. So she brought that home, and I thought, ‘Boy, there’s a connection!’ I didn’t have any others. So I came to Nashville, and that’s the first place I went. Knocked on his door. Marty said, ‘Well, I don’t know what to tell you, but you’re here. I guess you ought to get a job and start writing and singing demos and that kind of stuff.’ So that’s what I did.”
It turned out that Glen had given Marty Gamblin’s business card to many other aspiring country performers. But Alan is the only one who followed through and turned up on Marty’s doorstep two weeks later.
Denise’s “connection” paid off. Alan took a job in the mailroom at The Nashville Network (TNN) cable TV channel and applied himself to writing songs. In 1986, Marty Gamblin signed him as a $100-a-week songwriter, which enabled Alan to quit TNN and hit the road with his band. His publisher introduced him to music-industry figures up and down Music Row. He badgered record labels to sign Alan. He financed the recording session that led to Alan’s signing a contract with Arista Records on June 26, 1989. The process took more than four years, but Alan and Denise never gave up and never lost hope.
Alan’s subsequent success is all the more remarkable because there was so little in his upbringing in Newnan, Georgia, that prepared him for it. Born October 17, 1958, he was the fifth child and only son of an auto mechanic/assembly-line worker and his wife.
“We weren’t starvin’ poor or anything, but we weren’t that well off,” says Alan of his family. “We grew up more backwards than we did poor. I played with my cousins. My grandmother lived next door. It was like the Waltons. It was a real different kind of lifestyle than a lot of people had who grew up in that time. I think that helped me look at things a little different. I think that helps with your songwriting, and why a lot of people connect with some of the songs I write about everyday living.”
Alan has frequently referred to his early lifestyle in his songwriting. Hits such as “Chattahoochee,” “Livin’ on Love,” “Where I Come From,” and “Small Town Southern Man” all refer, in various ways, to the roots of his raising. “Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow” was the first of his hits that referred to his passion for country music.
“A lot of the artists in music that I liked were the older acts . . . what I call real country music. We listened to Conway Twitty and George Jones and Gene Watson and John Conlee and all of them people.
“When Hee Haw came out [in 1969], that was probably the earliest I remember being affected by real country music. My daddy watched that religiously. My daddy didn’t say much, but I just remember this one time, Buck Owens was playing on that show and he said, ‘You ought to be one of them singers,’ or something like that. I don’t know why it struck me. Even at that moment, it wasn’t like, ‘Okay, that’s what I’m gonna do.’ But I do remember that. And I’d always enjoyed music.
“I was a big Hank Williams Jr. fan, and I always sang his songs. I can do a ton of Don Williams songs, too, because I’m a big fan of his. I could do two albums’ worth of Merle Haggard songs. I’m a huge fan of Charley Pride’s.”
He started taking guitar lessons in 1974. He began singing country music in public when he was in high school. He also landed a role in his high school’s production of the cowboy musical Oklahoma!
“As I got to be a teenager, it was pretty pop-heavy at school. And disco, when I was in high school, and I survived all that. I started a little duo, singing with a girl who played guitar and sang harmony. We did all kinds of stuff. Most of it was kind of folky-country stuff.
“Then I hung out with a guy who was a little older than me, and we started our
first little band. This little band played on the weekends. There really weren’t hardly any clubs around the area. So it was more just playing little private parties, playing pizza joints or a little beer joint here and there. You’d play some current stuff that was on the radio. And you’d play some old stuff, and that’s what I did. I sang Gene Watson, George Jones, George Strait, John Anderson, and John Conlee.”
The band had been a rock group. But once group member Cody Deal heard Alan sing, the band completely changed its style to country. It was renamed Dixie Steel, after the brand name on a box of nails in Cody’s basement rehearsal space.
In 1976, Alan Jackson spotted a pretty blonde sixteen-year-old at the Newnan Dairy Queen. He flirted with Denise by walking over to her table and tossing a penny down her blouse. When she drove away from the restaurant, Alan surprised her by popping up from the car’s backseat, where he’d been hiding. Denise screamed and nearly drove off the road. She turned him down the first time he asked her for a date. She was captain of the cheerleading squad, the homecoming queen, a star tennis player, and a straight-A student. Alan wasn’t on any sports teams. He just played guitar and worked on cars.
A few months later, he ran into her and asked her if she’d like a ride in his gleaming-white, fully restored 1955 Thunderbird convertible. The next time he called to ask her out, she said yes. Alan and Denise were married on December 15, 1979. At the ceremony, he sang Pat Terry’s nuptial anthem “That’s the Way” to her. Alan sold his beloved T-bird for $10,000 so that he could make a down payment on a house for them.
By this time, Dixie Steel had become regionally popular. The group came in second at a talent contest in Atlanta. People began telling the singer that he was as good as anyone in Nashville. But Alan was reluctant to give up job security to take a chance in Nashville.
He’d been working practically all his life. Alan’s first job was cleaning up in a shoe-repair store at age twelve. He bought his own cars by working throughout junior high and high school. He worked as a carpenter and furniture salesman. He was a fork-lift operator at the regional Kmart warehouse on the night shift. In 1979, he began working at the Newnan Motor Company, selling Fords.
“I didn’t really have a lot of friends. I didn’t really socialize much until I got to be sixteen or seventeen. I kept to myself a lot and worked most of the time. That’s all I did was work and try to save money to buy a car.
In fact, when the Jacksons first moved to Nashville, it was the first time that Alan didn’t have a job. After his stint in the TNN mailroom, he worked at music full-time for the first time in his life. Throughout the first ten years of their marriage, Alan and Denise clung to their dreams. The reason his break in Music City was so long in coming was that everyone in power thought he was “too country.”
“They always said that,” Alan confirms. “It’s pretty weird. When I moved to town, Randy Travis had just hit, and I thought, ‘Man, this is it.’ Because at that time, I felt like the country music that I was hearing was a lot more pop-based and a little slicker and middle-of-the-road. When Randy hit, I thought, ‘This is it. They’re opening up. Randy paved the way for me.’ But I pounded around town for four, five years, and people just wouldn’t sign me. A lot of the acts that were getting signed were more slick. So I always said, ‘Well, I’m just too country for country music.’”
Even after signing with Arista, Alan faced an uphill battle. His first single, 1989’s “Blue Blooded Woman,” flopped. The label put him on the road to meet radio decision makers, so he wasn’t making any money. It didn’t look like the best time to be starting a family, but Denise was pregnant. Daughter Mattie was born in 1990.
On October 6, 1990, he sang “Here in the Real World,” the song that catapulted him to stardom, at his debut appearance on the Grand Ole Opry. Coincidentally, that was the same night that Garth Brooks became an Opry member. A year later, Alan was invited to join the cast of the Grand Ole Opry, too.
“The Grand Ole Opry, the first time I walked out there it scared me to death. I’d been on the stage, because I worked over at The Nashville Network for about eleven months when I first moved to town. And I used to go over there and stand on that stage during the day when I was delivering their mail to them. I always thought it would be pretty cool to come out there and sing. But I never thought it would happen. But there I was.
“What I really think about the Grand Ole Opry is that it is the cornerstone of country music. It’s made country music. It’s the mother. And it’s something I would like to see go on forever.”
Randy Travis inducted Alan into the show’s cast on June 7, 1991. Randy invited Alan to be his opening act on tour in 1992. The two cowrote Alan’s hit “She’s Got the Rhythm” and Randy’s hits “Better Class of Losers,” “Forever Together,” and “I’d Surrender All.”
On the road, fans responded powerfully to Alan’s shy humility, dry sense of humor, drawling speech, lanky 6-foot 4-inch frame, and blond, blue-eyed good looks. His laid-back charm matched the honest simplicity of his music.
By 1993, Alan Jackson was headlining his own concerts and had welcomed his second daughter, Ali. For that year’s Christmas gift, Denise tracked down Alan’s 1955 Thunderbird, bought it back, and presented it to her delighted husband.
“Don’t Rock the Jukebox,” “Gone Country,” and other blockbuster hits led to ten million in record sales by 1994. A Lot About Livin’ (And a Little ’Bout Love) sold six million more, and he was named the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year in 1995. Alan Jackson was as big as any star in Nashville in the late 1990s. But he was not a happy man. Shortly after the family moved to their Williamson County mansion, south of Nashville, and his third daughter, Dani, was born, Alan announced that he and Denise were separating. Just before Thanksgiving in 1997, he told his wife he was moving out. When Denise returned from a Christmas ski vacation, his things were gone. This painful time in their lives serves as the emotional centerpiece of her inspirational book.
“He had come to a point in his life,” Denise wrote, “where he was realizing that all the material things in the world did not buy happiness. Everyone knows that . . . but it’s another thing altogether to experience it. Alan had realized his greatest goals of music stardom, and enormous wealth and fame. But it didn’t fill his heart.
“One day he stood in front of our 25,000-square-foot mansion, looking over the perfect house and the perfectly manicured grounds and the perfect garages full of cars and boats and airplanes . . . and he whispered, ‘I’m still not happy.’ In some ways, I became the focal point of Alan’s unhappiness.”
During the separation, he lost 25 pounds. Denise plunged into anger and depression, but then she found strength in a renewed religious commitment. After three months apart, Alan asked her out on a date. They went into marriage counseling. In May 1998, Alan Jackson returned to his home and family. The following Sunday was Mother’s Day, and Denise and the girls returned from church to find Alan surprising them with a feast he’d cooked.
Through the remainder of the year, the Jacksons rebuilt their relationship. He confessed his infidelities. She continued to pray for reconciliation. On their nineteenth wedding anniversary, they exchanged new rings and renewed their vows. Alan again sang “That’s the Way” to his bride.
In 2001, a few weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Alan woke from a fitful sleep and began writing the moving ballad “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).” People wept when he introduced it on the CMA awards show on November 7. Alan Jackson became the only artist, in any field of music, to create a lasting song of healing in the wake of the tragedy. “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” is a true testament to his power as a songwriter.
“God wrote it,” he said humbly. “I just held the pencil.”
The song earned him a Grammy Award and CMA Single and Song of the Year awards. An estimated 3,500 people attended a 2001 Music Row outdoor party to celebrate Alan Jackson’s 35 million in r
ecord sales. Among them were his fellow Opry stars Jimmy Dickens, Trace Adkins, and George Jones.
The hits and awards kept coming for Alan, but in 2007, it was Denise Jackson who took the spotlight. She was not only featured in her husband’s video for “A Woman’s Love,” she published her memoir It’s All About Him: Finding the Love of My Life. Cowritten with Ellen Vaughn, the inspirational volume contained a foreword written by Alan, plus a CD containing his recordings of their wedding song, “That’s the Way,” and a new tune, “It’s All About Him.” On July 26, Denise’s publisher celebrated the book’s debut with a gala party at Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center.
“She’s always been the better half of this combo,” said Alan. “I’m glad she’s getting the chance to shine for a change. I’ve been in the spotlight too long, so I’m glad to be in the backfield. So many people are going to appreciate this book.
“She’s a special person. We’ve always loved each other. We just didn’t like each other sometimes. We grew up together and survived.
“So now you’re thanking me for all that heartache you had to write about?” he kidded her at the event. “She’s probably the reason God didn’t strike me dead a long time ago. I’m obviously very proud of Denise and so happy that she finally gets the chance to step from the side of the stage to the center and enjoy her own accomplishment.”
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Page 27